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My wrists love me!
Sep. 27th, 2004 04:00 pmToday's mail call brought my most recent crazy purchase in my goal of RSI-free wrists: a foot-operated mouse. (Note to web designers: if you want to inspire confidence in your computer products, do not make your product's homepage like this one! Sheesh!) As I write this entry -- navigating between the text boxes of the "Update Journal" page, switch to other browser windows to do web searches for the footmouse website, click back on a previous sentence to edit something, and so on -- I am using my new footmouse to do so. I have a pedal under my left foot, which I click forward to left-click and back to right-click. It makes a very satistfying yet quiet thud as I do so; it's probably actually quieter than clicking a mouse. Then for the bizarre one: a matching pedal under my right foot moves the cursor around. If I rotate my foot slightly in any direction, the cursor on the screen drifts in that direction; if I rotate it more, the cursor speeds up.
Moving up, down and right is very easy. Moving up-and-right or down-and-right is also very easy; moving up-and-left and down-and-left is somewhat easy. Moving straight to the left is hard. As your foot rests against the floor right now (it is resting against the floor, right? You don't type with your legs crossed Indian-style like I do, do you? It's not good for your typing posture!) try rotating your weight leftwards, not just to the ball of your feet so that the weight on that leg is evenly distributed between the ball and heel of the left side of your foot. No, I can't do it either. Maybe it'll get easier. What's really amazing is the amount of thought that has to go into activities that are normally reflexive. I just wanted to select a sentence, and I had to think through every step: insert cursor at one end, press shift, move cursor to other end, left-click. In fact, I had to try it out again in order to write that sentence in the proper order. Even having switched back and forth between mice, trackballs, touchpads and vertical mice since I got RSI in college, I've haven't had to think about that sequence of actions in many, many years.
Reviews of this mouse are mixed; some people say they couldn't live without them, while others say that they injured their ankles or knees more than they saved their wrists. I'll let you know how it goes.
(Extra thanks to Nikki_nana & co. for sending the package to us! It was shipped from California on Friday and arrived in my office in Doha on Monday; you can't beat that!)
If you can't tell, I don't have much to write about today. :-) I do keep meaning to get around to uploading the pictures from my digital camera so I can show you guys our trips up north last month and to the west coast this last weekend. Maybe I'll use it as a foot-mouse training exercise.
Moving up, down and right is very easy. Moving up-and-right or down-and-right is also very easy; moving up-and-left and down-and-left is somewhat easy. Moving straight to the left is hard. As your foot rests against the floor right now (it is resting against the floor, right? You don't type with your legs crossed Indian-style like I do, do you? It's not good for your typing posture!) try rotating your weight leftwards, not just to the ball of your feet so that the weight on that leg is evenly distributed between the ball and heel of the left side of your foot. No, I can't do it either. Maybe it'll get easier. What's really amazing is the amount of thought that has to go into activities that are normally reflexive. I just wanted to select a sentence, and I had to think through every step: insert cursor at one end, press shift, move cursor to other end, left-click. In fact, I had to try it out again in order to write that sentence in the proper order. Even having switched back and forth between mice, trackballs, touchpads and vertical mice since I got RSI in college, I've haven't had to think about that sequence of actions in many, many years.
Reviews of this mouse are mixed; some people say they couldn't live without them, while others say that they injured their ankles or knees more than they saved their wrists. I'll let you know how it goes.
(Extra thanks to Nikki_nana & co. for sending the package to us! It was shipped from California on Friday and arrived in my office in Doha on Monday; you can't beat that!)
If you can't tell, I don't have much to write about today. :-) I do keep meaning to get around to uploading the pictures from my digital camera so I can show you guys our trips up north last month and to the west coast this last weekend. Maybe I'll use it as a foot-mouse training exercise.
